In a series of photographs taken in the usually unseen moments after childbirth, Portia Webb explores the duality of the perception of birth, as an intimate and yet violent occurrence. Whilst void of human life, her evocative photographs contain signs and paraphernalia of the event whilst concealing a narrative.

‘Two For the Show’ is an exhibition of new work from artists group Sitting Ducks, exploring the theme of duality.

In this exhibition four artists explore the theme of duality in its many guises. Whether this came from the fact of Anthony Carr being an identical twin, or Kate Parrott making two different pieces of work from the same materials; the idea of dualism, twins, double meanings, and Déjà vu has been the starting point for this exhibition.

Naturally, the exhibition is in two parts, the second of which will feature a further four artists/doppelgangers, also working around this theme: this will take place in November.

Sitting Ducks are a group of artists who work in a diverse variety of media, ranging from photography and installation to painting and sculpture. They first exhibited in 2006 and have since gone on to produce exhibitions and projects across the south east of England.

'Scores of Silence’, sound artist Victoria Karlsson presents an installation of found and collected objects as scores for a piece of music, existing only within the viewers imagination.

In an exploration of the way sound resides, not only in the world around us but also within our own inner thoughts and memories, the chosen objects behave as ‘trigger’ devices. They aim to draw attention to the viewers own internal sounds connected to personal history, emotion and memory.

‘These new works are all extracted from the world around me; this is how I process what I see. In a society where we are bombarded with visual stimulate I filter, edit and document. These culminate into a visual diary with broken narratives, like reading a book with pages missing it has ambiguous consequences. Picked seemingly at random the subject matter has dark connotations, suggestions of an aftermath or maybe a ‘calm before the storm’ scenario. They are stripped bare of detail and abstracted,sitting on the semantic threshold of abstraction and representation.’

Not Holding the String draws together a collection of new work by artist Matthew James Kay. Sculptures, drawings and animations combine to form this exhibition inspired by occurrences of mistake-making, grace, doubt and faith in everyday life. Employing the stuff of common experience, Kay documents his experience of being human, a quest for the mysterious lurking in the mundane.

Steering clear of definite meanings and prescriptive individual interpretations, Kay's work invites the viewer into a dialogue with the exhibition as a whole. Kay's assemblages are reconfigured items of the artist's own domestic life, left over paint from decorating, a ripped innertube, the bees that mysteriously appear (dead) in the living room each spring, a shoe rack there just wasn't space for, an ill-kept bonsai, tokens of affection. This ephemera/detritus comes together to create new objects for thought- disused props that take up the role of protagonists in new narratives.

The artworks in Not Holding the String stand as markers in the artist’s ongoing exploration of the domestic adventure as a place of frustration and a process of becoming. The works inhabit a transient place where personal and circumstantial transformations occur in wrestling with the desire for real adventure, balancing our need for contentment and joy with the reality of dissatisfaction and doubt.

May Day celebrations are historically routed in the psyche of the British Isles. The Rites of Spring, opening on May 1st, presents work that reflects on the customs, ceremonies and meanings surrounding this institution.

Traditionally the origins of May Day, and the eve before, were given over to revelry and sexual desires, as an invocation of fertility, death and renewal. Jayne Eagle’s installations and sculpture consists of these notions reflecting on the folklore and mythological aspects surrounding them. Customary objects are used within the pieces, such as the Hawthorn tree, specifically chosen for its symbolic legacy. Besides being the tree of choice from which the maypole was cut, it has often been linked to fertility, and has carried a duality of sexual associations from abandonment to the tree of chastity. Informed by ideas of the Uncanny and imagery from Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, the work draws upon the familiar whilst containing the unexpected.

Alice White works in the realms where pagan beliefs give way to a wistful, more idealised May Day, with children’s parades and young May Queens. Imagery taken from nostalgic May Days in England, she focuses on the background children, the losers, the smiles of disappointment. Working with household gloss paints in pastel shades, saccharine disenchantments are reflected upon. This supposedly idyllic, childhood moment containing the rites of passage, it is a fairy tale of flowers, dresses and parties of which all little girls dream… but not every little girl will be a queen